It takes the whole brain to make a cup of coffee: the neuropsychology of naturalistic actions involving technical devices

Physics instruction induces changes in neural knowledge representation during successive stages of learning

“…This partitioning of the learning process illuminates the early learning state focused on visual transformations of component units involving IPS and the subsequent causality processing, leading to a sequenced understanding of the mechanical systems that occurred in later states. This hypothesis is consistent with evidence from neuropsychological literature that indicates ideational apraxia patients with right-sided or diffuse brain damage (primarily in the frontal lobe and potentially in the parietal lobe) have problems with multi-step actions involving technical devices such as coffee makers (Hartmann et al, 2005).…”

Neural correlates of Early Stone Age toolmaking: technology, language and cognition in human evolution

“…This probably reflects an increasingly critical role for the RH-left-hand system in hand axe production as well as the involvement of more complex and protracted technical action sequences (cf. Hartmann et al 2005). The increased right SMG activation extends the trend seen in expert Oldowan knapping and is best interpreted as reflecting further increases in the importance of visuospatial representations of the toolCbody system in this task.…”

“…platform preparation, bifacial edging, thinning) as well as the continual rejection of immediately attractive opportunities in favour of actions serving longer term objectives. Perhaps for similar reasons, lesion studies indicate an important RH contribution to the successful completion of multistep mechanical problems (Hartmann et al 2005). The increasingly anterior and RH-dominant frontal activation during Late Acheulean toolmaking reflects the more complex, multi-level structure of the task (figure 3), which includes the flexible iteration of multi-step processes in the context of larger scale technical goals.…”

Tool Use And Related Errors in Ideational Apraxia: the Quantitative Simulation of Patient Error Profiles

“…However, the work to date has focussed on data from group studies of semi-complex naturalistic tasks (preparing and packing a child's 1 Unlike Schwartz and colleagues, Hartmann et al (2005) did not perform analyses of the errors of their patient groups. Rather, they scored performance on naturalistic tasks in terms of accomplishment of steps within each task and examined associations and dissociations between these measures and performance on other tasks.…”

“…An alternative account, however, for the similarities in error profiles may be developed by assuming that behaviour is the product of multiple interacting systems, where the interactions are such that damage to different systems may, at least on the kinds of naturalistic tasks explored by Schwartz and colleagues, result in similar behavioural disorders. Hartmann et al (2005) have provided evidence for such an account by demonstrating that while two groups of patients with left and right brain damage did not differ on the performance of two naturalistic tasks (preparing filter…”